Trading cards are a well-known method of disbursing and collecting information about public figures. A familiar type of trading card is the baseball card that has a photographic depiction of an athlete along with biographical and statistical information about the athlete. These baseball cards and other cards dealing with various sports figures are used by sports enthusiasts for gathering information about players and teams. Trading cards have also been developed in other areas, such as the entertainment industry, which depict music performers and television and movie personalities.
Trading cards are typically exchanged among enthusiasts to obtain cards that are needed to complete a set of related cards or to collect cards that are not readily available. Collectors buy and sell these cards for their economic and historic value. The cards themselves have varying monetary values, depending on the popularity of the individual depicted thereon and the availability of each card, some being more common than others. Such cards are typically sold through retail game stores and other specialty outlets.
Playing cards, on the other hand, especially the well-known fifty-two deck face cards, are easily and readily available. The cards themselves, individually and collectively, generally have no value other than for amusement. Many different games can be played with a single deck of playing cards, limited generally by the imagination of the players. Some card games require cards especially printed for that game, and these cards have little value outside the playing of that particular game.
Many games played with the more common face cards are games of chance. In other words, these games have rules that require either the random selection of cards or depend on the occurrence of events outside the control of the players. Other games that require some strategy usually limit the level of strategy with restrictive rules of play.
At the present, there are no known games that use freely tradable game elements or components, such as trading cards, and further, games that enable a player to form a unique combination of components that competes against the combinations of other players.